The inclusive Red Entertainment package can be either Sky Sports Mobile TV, NOW TV or Spotify Premium. It lasts for the full length of your plan (typically, that’s 24 months if you buy a handset on contract or 12 months if you get a SIM-only deal).

In this article, we’ll compare Vodafone’s three types of price plan. We’ll look at how the Essentials, Red Extra and Red Entertainment plans compare. We’ll also look into the Red Entertainment offer in more detail, including what you’re able to get from the Sky Sports, NOW TV or Spotify Premium packages.

The Vodafone Global Roaming service allows you to use your UK allowances when abroad. There are 48 ‘Roam-free’ destinations in Europe (where you can use your phone at no extra charge) and 104 ‘Roam-further’ destinations (where you can use your UK plan allowances for an extra £6/day).

Wi-Fi Calling allows you to make and receive phone calls, even when you don’t have a mobile connection (e.g. when travelling on the London Underground). It’s available when choosing a Red Extra or Red Entertainment plan, and when choosing a compatible handset from Vodafone.

Vodafone Secure Net is an internet security solution designed to block unsafe websites over 3G/4G and to help you to locate a misplaced device. It will cost you an additional £1/month after the 3-month free trial is complete. There are a number of limitations with the Secure Net service. At Ken’s Tech Tips, we’d recommend against using this feature as we believe there are far better solutions out there (which are also often free of charge).

Inclusive entertainment is available to customers on a Red Entertainment plan. You can choose from an inclusive subscription to either Sky Sports Mobile TV, NOW TV or Spotify Premium. Use of these applications will still count as normal towards your data allowance.

If you’re choosing a SIM-only deal, Vodafone also offers a secret tariff called Vodafone Basics. Available from £6/month on a 12-month contract, Vodafone Basics comes without support for international roaming.

Through the rest of this article, we’ll discuss the inclusive entertainment options in more detail.

Sky Sports Mobile TV

Sky Sports Mobile TV is one of the most popular choices for the inclusive Red Entertainment package. Customers choosing the Sky Sports option will get a 24-month inclusive subscription to Sky Sports Mobile TV Pack 1 (or a 12-month subscription is included on Red Entertainment SIM cards).

The Sky Sports package is worth £5.99/month and will give you access to the Sky Sports Premier League, Sky Sports Action, Sky Sports Arena, Sky Sports News and Sky News channels on your mobile phone. The subscription covers you to watch Sky Sports on an iPhone or selected Android devices. It does not cover you to watch Sky Sports on a TV or on any other device.

If you’re watching Sky Sports Mobile TV on a 3G or 4G connection, keep a close eye on how much data is consumed by the application. At maximum quality, one hour of video equates to around 2.2GB of data (so approximately 3.3GB for a 90-minute football match). You can watch at a lower quality to save on data usage, or you can use wi-fi networks whenever there is one is available.

You can activate your Sky Sports Mobile TV subscription by texting Entertainment to 97613, once your new phone or SIM card is set up on Vodafone.

Now TV

Customers wanting access to on-demand and live entertainment can choose NOW TV as their inclusive entertainment option. With this, you’ll get a 24-month subscription to the NOW TV Entertainment Pack (worth £7.99/month), for viewing on your smartphone and on other connected devices (like your laptop, tablet or smart TV).

The NOW TV Entertainment Pack allows you to watch content from 11 entertainment channels. The inclusive channels are Sky Atlantic, Sky 1, Sky Living, Sky Arts 1, Gold, MTV, Fox, ITV Encore, Nat Geo Wild and Comedy Central, which can all be watched live or through on-demand playback. With on-demand playback, you’ll also get access to more than 300 box sets from the above channels and from ABC Studios.

Mobile Data Consumption

If you’re streaming content from NOW TV over a mobile data connection, it’s worth keeping a very close eye on how much data you use. According to the NOW TV forums, watching one hour of video at maximum quality can use up to 2.2GB of data. You can reduce this by watching content at a lower quality, or making use of wi-fi networks when available.

You can activate your inclusive NOW TV subscription by texting Entertainment to 97613, once your new phone or SIM card is set up on Vodafone.

Spotify Premium

Spotify is an online music streaming service. Rather than downloading music and paying for it on a per-track basis, Spotify charges a flat monthly fee for all the music you can stream over the internet. There are currently over 30 million songs available in the Spotify catalogue.

Although a free version of Spotify is available, it has limited functionality when you use it on a smartphone. Although the free version allows you to build personalised playlists, you can’t listen to on-demand music in the same way you can on Spotify Premium. You’ll also need to need to listen to occasional adverts when using the free tier of Spotify.

With Vodafone Red Entertainment, you can choose to use your inclusive entertainment package on Spotify Premium (worth £9.99/month). Spotify Premium will allow you to listen to on-demand music, with a full advertising-free experience. The subscription will also work across all of your devices including your smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC, web browser and compatible home entertainment systems. You can also download music for listening offline.

Mobile Data Consumption

Although a Spotify Premium subscription is included in your Red Entertainment plan, data consumed by the Spotify app will still count towards your monthly download limit. The Spotify app uses the following amounts of data:

Spotify Music Quality

Bitrate (kbit/s)

Data Consumption (1 hour)

Low Quality (Default)

96kbit/s

43MB per hour

High Quality

160kbit/s

72MB per hour

Extreme Quality

320kbit/s

144MB per hour

Spotify can stream music at three different quality settings. The default setting uses 43MB for one hour of listening.

Assuming you were to use the default setting (low quality streaming), listening to an hour of Spotify would consume about 43MB of data. That’s equivalent to about 1.3GB per month if you were to listen to Spotify for an hour per day.

In practice, data consumption will be slightly lower than this as Spotify will keep an offline copy of recently played songs (a process known as “caching”). When listening to the same song for a second time through the app, Spotify will access the locally-cached version instead of downloading a new version from the internet.

If you’re a subscriber to Vodafone’s Music Pass, which costs an extra £5/month, you’ll have an unlimited data allowance for use on Spotify and six other music streaming services (Napster, Tidal, SoundCloud, Deezer, Apple Music and Amazon Music).

You can activate your Spotify Premium membership by texting Entertainment to 97613, once your new phone or SIM card is set up on Vodafone.

Keeping Your Phone Number

In order to transfer your phone number to Vodafone, you should firstly contact your current mobile network to ask them for a PAC Code. This is a nine-digit code that authorises Vodafone to take control of your phone number, and your mobile network is legally obliged to provide it free of charge within two hours of your request.

Once you’ve obtained the PAC Code from your current mobile network, you can sign up for your new Pay Monthly contract or SIM card from Vodafone. After your new phone or SIM card arrives in the post, you should provide the PAC Code to Vodafone through a form on their website. After submitting your PAC Code to Vodafone, your phone number will normally be transferred on the next working day.

Xaviersaid:

Hi Xavier,
Thanks for the heads up about this! I didn’t know this feature was only available on the Red tariffs – thanks for letting me know, and I’ve just added this into the table above.
Thanks again,
Ken

Clairesaid:

Hi, i wonder if you can help, Vodafone chat just keep resetting my acct! I have the above benefit on my new contract and I have chosen Spotify. However, I have Premium on my phone but on my laptop I only have basic!! Do you have any solution to this. As I said I have tried Vodafone chat twice and they just turn my membership off anf on again.
Thanks

Hi Claire,
Many thanks for your comment. I believe the ‘Spotify Premium’ status is attached to an account, rather than being attached to a specific device. Is there a possibility the two devices might be signed in to different accounts (e.g. perhaps one of them is using a Facebook login, and the other one is using a Spotify-specific login)? This is probably something that Spotify support can also have a look into for you.
Hope this helps,
Ken

Hi Andrew,
Unfortunately, you can only watch Sky Sports on your iPhone or Android smartphone (it isn’t possible to use the iPad to watch it). This is really a revenue protection measure from Sky – the reason they offer mobile TV at a lower cost is because you’re not able to see it on a larger screen. More info here and also in the forum discussion here.
Hope this helps,
Ken

Hassan Sultanreplied:

Hi Hassan,
Thanks for your comment. I haven’t tried it myself in this case, but I believe some smartphone applications implement digital rights management so you’re prevented from mirroring the content onto another screen. I don’t know whether this is true in this case but I imagine they’ve probably thought this through and made it difficult for you to do this!
Ken

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About Ken

My passion is helping people to get the most out of their mobile phone. I've been blogging at Ken's Tech Tips since 2005.

Aside from writing about mobile technology, I have an interest in software development, digital marketing and physics. Outside of the blog, I work with numerous technology companies helping them to market their product to consumers. Find out more.